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Might it be significant that the NIH results don't have the +1 button, nor Instant Preview, when they're in the SERPs?

I'm joining some pretty distant dots here, but that might suggest that they're part of a separate search index? I can certainly see how providing one authoritative link for a very precise medical query would enhance search quality.

It's a hell of a joining-of-dots, and I hate to utter anything along the lines of "two indexes" or "supplemental index" etc. But the NIH listings behave differently in the SERPs, and I can see how there's greater inherent value in a set of search results that returns verified authority links for medical queries than a set of search results that doesn't.

It's either part of Google getting smarter and detecting absolute authoritative results for a search vertical or... Google starting to steer away from their algorithm only and no-humans policy in results and marking certain things by hand.

I did a quick search for that image in Tin Eye (nothing) and in Google (1 result) so it seems like this is Google's thing only and the image is designed to highlight a verified health result.

This reminds me of comment that Mr. Weitz from Bing said about the future of search and how ridiculous it might be to judge the validity of results by link popularity in some cases:

"An expert from Bing, Stefan Weitz, notes that relevancy in search is based on PageRank. PageRank determines the position of a web page based on the analysis of links referring to that page. He notes that relying solely on this model to find, for instance, the best cancer hospital is ridiculous."

I have often thought along these lines, having a encyclipiedia and dictionary in the results for many terms is more impoartant than relying on the algo. in fact I thiink rand did a article stateing things like "results need freshness", stateingg that the results will include a new result as well as a research result and other sort of results aswell of what the algo brings up.A query for a type of car, may mean you want to buy, hire, fix, see race video, find images or learn about. results should try to get all these types of results even if they do not deserver high rank by algo alone.

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